Part 4

The Death of a Loved One

Part of this post is excerpted from my forthcoming book, How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss and What They Can Do to Help

Behind childhood grief is a world of feelings and beliefs, shaped and colored by your child’s age and stage of development but also by your child’s personality, the degree of closeness she had with the person who died, your particular family circumstances, your culture AND by the way you feel yourself.

The problem in understanding what your child feels about her loss is that it is often difficult for her to put this into words. And lacking an explanation, adults who try to help a grieving child often look at the child’s behavior. And when they look at the child’s behavior, they form ideas of what the child is feeling and how they are affected based just on external impressions.

And in doing so, they can miss a lot.

They can miss what the child feels about the loss, they can miss what the child understands about the loss, they can miss the child’s misconceptions about death and loss in general. They can miss the child’s fantasies about this loss in particular and what role the child believes she played in causing the loss to happen.

And it is important not to miss these things.